Post Your Comment

26 Comments

I posted of an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD this morning - the 2nd or 3rd time it's died. I've only trialed a handful of OCZ drives here as upgrades for laptops but seen a 100% failure rate (and had replacements fail) so somehow I think I'll be finding PCIe SSDs from a real company to put in my servers. You'd have to be a lunatic or a daredevil to put a product from a company with the "pedigree" of OCZ in a production server of any importance.Reply

+1Just came to post the same thing...I've also had a 100% failure rate on OCZ SSD's and as far as I'm concerned they can close down the doors and never make another product again and I'd be perfectly fine with that.

I wouldn't put an OCZ product in a budget desktop build let alone in the same building as any production equipment.Reply

I've had an Agility 60GB and a Vertex 2 120GB running happily for the past years as a desktop system drive and then a laptop system drive, no issues. Just to give the other side of these anecdotal complaints. :PReply

I take your point, but I have over 100 Samsung 480, 830 and 840 series SSDs in use and have not seen a single failure. Some very intensive workstation usage at that. Go anywhere you care and read user reviews of OCZ drives and they are mixed at best - why take that risk when there are alternatives available?

What you have to ask yourself is this "What do the OEMs who offer next day man on site support on their hardware for 3 to 5 years use". They validate intensively and will focus heavily on reliability because the cost of sending a man out to swap a drive will wipe out the profit on that laptop. I'll give you a hint: You will not find a single OEM stupid enough to put OCZ drives in their machines.Reply

The one friend that I ever recommended to buy an OCZ SSD (they were on a fantastic sale) ended up having a 100% failure rate: the OCZ SSD failed, the warranty replacement OCZ SSD failed, and the replacement's replacement failed.

After apologizing profusely to my friend for his pain, I recommended he buy an Intel SSD to replace it. It's been running perfectly ever since.

Moral of the story? OCZs drives are to be avoided at all costs. They don't necessarily all fail, but their failure rate is ludicrously high compared to their competitors like Intel or Samsung.Reply

i have a 60gb vertex 2 that has been operating flawlessly in my main pc since they were first releasedi also have a 120gb agility in my laptop that has been running with no hassles since i purchased it years agoReply

I have a total of 8 OCZ SSDs, from a 60GB Apex to two Vertex 4s and an Agility 4. All are still in consistent use in various systems in my home. I had problems with the Vertex 2s, not wanting to start up after a system went into standby, but I found that many restarts (<30 on one and <60 on the other) using a USB to SATA adapter caused the drives to come back up. After updating the firmware, they never shut down like that again.

That's the big thing with OCZ drives: you have to make sure you update the firmware when they release new versions. The latest firmware keeps the drives from falsely 'dying.' I say falsely because most of the drives I've seen fail are easily brought back, either through power cycling repeatedly or through the OCZ firmware updater. The hardware is fine, but the software gets stuck somehow.

Also, I have found with several other brand SSDs, including an Intel 180GB 330 and a Mushkin 60GB Chronos, that standby is a very SSD unfriendly process. I have had so many drives, both my own and in other family members' systems, stop operating after going into standby. I was able to get each and every one of them back up with repeated power cycles. Also, Window's "shut down the hard drive" function in power management seems to do this. If you're going to use an SSD, make sure and turn these things off. Firmware updates seem to correct this, but not 100%.

I would be willing to bet the troubles you all see are related to this. They are fixable, and they are avoidable.Reply

Nope. OCZ Vertex 2 drives have a well known problem with just locking up in a way the end user cannot recover from on resuming from sleep. All of the drives I've had fail were on the latest firmware at the time, including the one that died yesterday. I've never had any problems with other brands of SSD going in and out of sleep, and to be honest for something in a laptop form factor to have an issue with something as fundamental to a laptop as sleeping and waking up is hardly acceptable.

Powering off and on again 100 times will not bring these to life. THey are not detected by any system and so flashing the firmware with the OCZ updater is not an option. More to the point, why should I even have to do that? The product is crap.

I'm dealing with a sample size of maybe 150 - 200 SSD drives. Not vast, but enough to see clear patterns.Reply

2 x OCZ drives failed. The old, terrible (Indillix? ones).1 x 160GB X25M, dead on arrival. Replacement going strong to this day, but poor write performance.2 x Kingston-branded 100GB (Force?) drives failed in Mac Books. Put a mechanical disk in that to keep the customer happy.1 x Patriot Wildfire 240GB. Part of MY raid0, on my machine. Other one is fine. Will RMA that today. 2yrs old and they are honoring the warranty, nice.1x X25E 64GB, no problems, never, ever, never. Still going strong, not so much as a hiccup.1 x Samsung 840 120GB. No problems yet, but its early days...so can't comment much on that.

I'll never put a non-enterprise SSD in a machine again, based on the experience of the X25E - the best SSD I ever had. I know the cost of enterprise SSDs is high, but that is for a reason, they are great.Reply

I've had a totally different experience with OCZ drives. I own 10 and starting with the Agility series up to the current Vector 450's. All 10 drives are operating and have been since installation. All also add that the conversion of my laptop to a 512mg Vector was flawless thanks to the included cloning software. These drives are revolutionary and have saved me the time, money and hassel of having to upgrade my older computers. OCZ rocks!Reply

One of the things I think happens is that people get marginal controllers that cause some hardware to crash. I've certainly had that happen with a faulty RAID controller eating hard drives. That being said, I would be very reluctant to use an OCZ drive in a mission-critical situation because there simply have been too many more complaints vs. other names that provide hardware that performs well and also doesn't seem to be as controller sensitive (or are just built better, whatever the case).

Frankly, for mission-critical, you'd be hard pressed to get me off of an Intel solution.

That being said, I could let OCZ talk me into something for my gaming rig, being as how I keep a whole second computer for "backup" anyway, heh. However, they have very stiff competition from players that have excellent reputations. Frankly, the main pull for me to buy OCZ is that for some reason I like the company (I think that's based on an article Anandtech did awhile back, or at least my memory of that article :) , and I'd rather give my money to a "maverick on the rise" than a behemoth like Intel or Samsung.

I WANT them to succeed, but I do think they need to do something to enhance their reputation if they want to stay in the SSD business.Reply

Most organizations that can afford the price tag for this kind of hardware don't rely on RAID controllers inside local servers. The storage for SQL is carved off some tier of their storage infrastructure/san and presented to the server normally via Fibre Channel. That is why this kind of in-host solution doesn't make sense to me. The cloud model is normally one to many so having a device that I need to stick in one server that can only be used by .... one server breaks the virtualization model that is every growing..Reply

Seems rather pricy, and only really applies to huge systems. Can't comment on reliability, but I've never gone with an OCZ drive - I have Crucial M4's in my webserver - rock solid and fast except for the 5000 hour bug which was easy enough to fix with a re-flash - and no data loss.Reply

I've said this before, and I"ll say it again: I really wish Anandtech had tests of SSDs in RAID-5 arrays. This is really useful for SMBs who may not want/afford a SAN. I'm very curious to see if the 20% spare area affects SSDs just as much when they're RAIDed together as it does standalone. I also don't care if the SSDs are branded as "enterprise" drives. It would be nice to see how a 5x256GB Samsung 840 Pro RAID-5 array would peform, or even a 5x400GB Seagate 600 Pro RAID-5 array.Reply

Actually, where I work I recently specced out a few systems with a LSI9271 8i hooked up to 4 regular 500GB Samsung 840 drives. Not the Pros. Stripe size was set to 256k, and even with a deep queue these drives just chug through data. These boxes replaced ones that had 8x 2TB drives in a raid 5, and they realistically couldn't push more than 8.8-9.5MBps of our workload (heavy random reads and writes). With the SSDs they sit at idle, and are currently limited by the double gig links on the box itself.

Here's a shot of the atto disk in Server 2012. http://i.imgur.com/xU05cdC.png Rest of the box is a hex core 2ghz e5-2620, 16gb DDR3 ECC @ 1600mhz on a supermicro x9d4l-if board.Reply

It may be more economical (when using ZFS) to use SSDs as an L2ARC and SLOG in front of regular spinning rust. You'd need a minimum of three drives for that (the L2ARC doesn't need to be mirrored because it doesn't matter if it fails, but the SLOG needs a mirror to avoid data loss on failure)Reply

Eh it scales about as well as consumer end does. As for the life, I have four pm810s in a raid 0 on a perc5 flashed with newer lsi firmware and they are still alive and doing their thing, the pm810 is and mlc drive and the perc5 has no clue what a ssd is and bitches about them constantly not being sas drives, so it just treats them like normal drives and I have to rely on the on drive wear leveling and what not. The controller also has four 2t drives in a raid 5.

Interesting note the newer version of the storage manager has an ssd caching ability which I would totally love to try however that's only supported by the newer lsi controllers and not my old ass perc5.Reply

Looks more or less identical in architecture and functionality as bcache in Linux, just that it has some artificial limitations wrt "firmware support" (read: some flag or name the software checks for) and perhaps a GUI of sorts.Reply

I'm not sure how well this product will do in large IT enterprises (which are the only ones with the budget to spend 7 or 15K on an acceleration solution for SQL)Companies that need this kind of performance are going to go with time tested solutions from major Enterprise vendors that already have established products along these lines..Reply

I love all my OCZ products I have bought to upgrade my laptops. They are so so so so so fast I can't even describe it. Restarts and booting up now are like nothing. How can I ever go back to HDD's...never. Never had one fail on me yet and I have been using them for years. I think this Sql server solution also won interlop in las vegasReply

So far, all of the complaints in the comments are on OCZ's consumer-grade gear. OCZ Enterprise seems to be a fairly distinct unit, from what I can tell, with a different site, different hardware, and different standards.

I've been running an OCZ Z-Drive R4 (which was $2200 for a 300gb model) for around 6 months in a financial environment, and the biggest issue that I've had is driver support. You really can't plug and play a drive like this- the array of controllers (4 on my 300gb, 8 on the biggers ones) need OCZ's closed-source drivers to work correctly. OCZ had an extremely limited offering of Linux drivers, and didn't have anything at all that would work with the servers that I was running (our kernel was too new). According to the research I did at the time, and after speaking with OCZ Enterprise support, this is not an uncommon complaint with the Z-Drives. I wasn't able to make the drive work correctly in this environment, and neither were any of my colleagues.

Eventually, I gave up and put it into a high-end Windows workstation. At the time (not sure if this is still the case), there were no Windows 8 drivers available, and I didn't want to chance it after my Linux fiasco, so I was stuck using Windows 7. Fortunately, it flies, and has been reliable so far. I had planned to use it to accelerate my MySQL server environment, but went a slightly different direction since that was ultimately impossible. As a client-side device, it's pretty awesome, and I am still able to realize a benefit.

It's extremely disappointing that this is only being offered for Microsoft SQL Server, as this would be really interesting with Percona. However, OCZ's tradition of crap Linux drivers seems to have caused them to just give up on it.Reply

the very idea of using OCZ for anything in a server environment looks like a BOFH plan. I still regret the day i took anandtech's advice and got a 1st gen vertex. that thing ( i refuse to call it an ssd) died so many times, and i lost so much data because of destructive firmware "upgrades" after those deaths that i also joined the club of OCZ haters.Reply